I am Spartacus
No, I am Spartacus!
A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
41–50 of 152 posts
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#42Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#43Simple psychology would lead me to guess that it is you Jacques. If I wanted to tell how easy it was to identify an anonymous comment, then I'd make one. I'd then publicise it, and challenge other people to crack it. Maybe I'm being too clever for my own good...
Or it is you nagrom.
Sadly, in this case, I am not Spartacus. That would require a mind so cunning that it makes mine hurt just to think of it ;-)
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#44it's pretty impossible to identify a user just by 1 anonymous post on a website.(without the logs). I mean sure you can compare a person's typing style...but unless they always add "jambalaya" to their posts, it'll be next to impossible to be 100% sure.
The way it works in real life, is that you find a person's email address or a long term account on a forum, and then use that info to build up a full profile about that person. The longer the person is on the web, the more personal information they've revealed in the past.
i.e. 6 months ago they might have mentioned their phone #...so you can use whitepages to see their address. Or maybe they posted a link to their site..where they didn't have privacy enabled, so you can get the full name and address using whois. Or maybe they are using the same username on all sites, so you can use google to see all the forums they've ever posted on. etc
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#45Simple psychology would lead me to guess that it is you Jacques. If I wanted to tell how easy it was to identify an anonymous comment, then I'd make one. I'd then publicise it, and challenge other people to crack it. Maybe I'm being too clever for my own good...
Or it is you nagrom.
Or you! Or me...
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#46it's pretty impossible to identify a user just by 1 anonymous post on a website.(without the logs). I mean sure you can compare a person's typing style...but unless they always add "jambalaya" to their posts, it'll be next to impossible to be 100% sure. The way it works in real life, is that you find a person's email address or a long term account on a forum, and then use that info to build up a full profile about th…
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a quick look at his comments, he seems to match the other heuristics seasoup mentions in that thread: meticulously correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation, use of semicolons, and use of dashes. He also seems to comment heavily on technical issues - programming languages, database technologies, so it might make sense for him to feel heavy non-tech opinions deserve a onetimetoken. Similarly reasoned, the sentim…
Yeah it's almost crowd sourced. Reminds me of when the cops put a letter or riddle from a serial killer in the newspaper figuring someONE out there will recognize it, as opposed to a computer recognizing it. Or maybe that just happens in the movies.
The unabomber was caught by his brother recognizing his writing.
"...his brother recognized Ted's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipped off the FBI." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#48I bet it's tokenadult. I do not have any other proof than the fact that I immediately thought of that username when I saw onetimetoken. :-)
I don't think tokenadult would mind posting that comment from his own account. The person that posted this sees his HN-identity as not stating strong opinions.
or, they where willing to make a point about anonymity by creating a new act.
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#49I'm not sure I'll have the time to do this, but I've had some good results running Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation on a similar problem. In my case, I have data from people playing a negotiation game and having a conversation with a human actor. I have scores from a human judge going from 1 - 5. Using LDA on the transcriptions of the dialog I can predict the results of the human judge to a correlation of .5 There was a previous study with essay's a teacher grades that got .8 with LSA. The LSA study used a much larger training corpus outside the individuals.
For slightly more details, here's a sketch of the algorithm: Treat each comment as a "document" input to LDA. Use the theta matrix that represents the distribution of topics over each document. Then use the inverse dot product between two document theta vectors and perform k Nearest Neighbors to predict IDs. You should be able to tune the rank and k values from all the labelled data.
When it comes time to infer I suggest running the with the whole set through LDA instead of reusing the discovered alpha and beta. For some reason (which I'm not entirely sure of), my results seem much better that way.
Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely a possibility... but based on what ?
i tossed a few of the stylistic quirks into a search and took a look at some writing samples. i think his stuff looks the most similar. i'm going purely on my own arbitrary judgment. it just feels right. :) the method itself isn't much different than what has already been talked about. edit: oh right, i also looked at the fact that he was posting comments on HN around the time that the one in question was posted. a l…
> i also looked at the fact that he was posting comments on HN around the time that the one in question was posted. a lot of my other candidates didn't meet that data point.
Ah, very clever, another angle of attack. Never thought of that one.